Annie Nelson of the Columbia Tribune (Missouri) profiles a number of people in the region who are unaffiliated with any particular religious group.

They’re not all atheists, but they’re sick and tired of the faith in which they were raised:
Columbia atheist Ken Albright was a little boy when he first started questioning the fundamentalist Christian beliefs being taught to him at the Church of the Nazarene after a Sunday school teacher told him the moon would turn to blood during the rapture, the Christian prophesy of the end times on Earth.
“I thought, ‘I know the moon isn’t made of cheese, so how are they going to do that?’ You know, they talked about people rising up from the dead – what age are they going to be in heaven? … When babies go to heaven, is someone going to have to change their diapers? There are so many issues with the after-the-rapture stuff if you try to apply any logic to it that it falls apart, but most religion does if you apply logic to it,” Albright said, “and I was a logical squirt, I guess.”
…
[Rebecca] MacLeod said she has a hard time reconciling certain religious beliefs, like the fact that her baby niece was born with sin. “She doesn’t know about good and evil, and she doesn’t have to,” MacLeod said.
She can’t accept Jesus Christ being a man and God at the same time, and she doesn’t think there is a way to have God’s word – as in religious texts – without proving the existence of God in the first place.
“I find that there is a lot of beauty and truth just experiencing the world through five senses, and if you need something more than that, then you’re not experiencing what’s happening – the journey, if you will,” she said.
…
Ted Jensen… believes in the teachings of Jesus Christ but said he rarely, if ever, goes to church….
Jensen doesn’t like the intolerance of religions toward each other and thinks religions often can hide irrational thinking like religious radicals. “There’s good religion and bad religion,” Jensen said.
I sometimes get asked if I wish to convert everyone to atheism.
Personally, I could care less if you’re a Scarlet-A atheist or not.
I’d much rather have people of faith shake off the stronghold that religion has on their lives.
Be unaffiliated. Be an ex-Catholic or an ex-Mormon. Be an Apatheist if you wish.
Just don’t let religion run or ruin your life if that’s what it does.
Not every faith or denomination is destructive to society, but many are. The people that leave them don’t have to join our “club,” but the more “nones” we have in this country, the better off we all are.
[tags]atheist, atheism[/tags]